Priority Club Insider lists various discounted rate offers for Intercontinental Hotels Group properties (some Europe-specific). (Meanwhile, here’s my post on getting the best hotel rates across all the chains and also how to score hotel upgrades as well.)

Million Mile Secrets describes how to still churn the Citibank American Airlines cards and how to get multiple cards approved with bonuses at the same time if you’re a first-time cardmember. As I’ve noted here on this blog before, the monster bonuses like 75,000 miles after modest spend that supposedly expired still seem to work.

The Points Guy notes a 25% bonus on transfers from the US American Express Membership Rewards program to Virgin Atlantic. There are a few decent award options, such as Gulf Air, but mostly this remains a poor deal given fees that often trump even BA’s and that many of the Virgin awards can be had more cheaply booked through other programs. But it’s still worth noting, I could see myself topping off my Virgin account which mostly has Avis 1-day car rentals credited to it (each 1-day Avis rental earns 1000 Virgin miles).

One Mile at a Time offers specific tips for playing call center roulette. Whenever you aren’t getting the answer you want from a travel provider, the general rule is hang up, call back. But Ben underscores the need to do it without arguing, to avoid notes being placed in a reservation if you’ve already made one, and also flags that it can be useful to pay attention to who you’re talking to in case you get the same agent again when you call back.

Matthew flags the great news that United will bring back zone boarding, and that it will even become the standard over at Continental. A United policy actually wins out in the merger, as the carrier listened to its customers. Uniformed military will board with Global Services and before first class (which does still seem strange to me), and while all elites will get to use the (blue) red carpet they’ll segment the boarding announcements still. To the extent that they’re keeping and selling economy plus, this was really the only option, otherwise they’d be upselling customers only for those customers to be punished by boarding them last and having them find no overhead space.